The wooden rooms
Old furniture and lines from his books.
Jdvillalobos — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Jdvillalobos — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Jdvillalobos — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Jdvillalobos — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Jdvillalobos — CC BY-SA 4.0 · Jdvillalobos — CC BY-SA 4.0
The Gabriel García Márquez House Museum stands in Aracataca, the small town on Colombia's Caribbean side where the Nobel Prize-winning novelist was born. It occupies the plot of his maternal grandparents' house, where he was born in 1927 and lived until he was four, in the town that inspired Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The original house was built of palm and wattle and daub, the local materials before the American fruit company arrived. A fire destroyed it in 1925 and it was rebuilt, and then demolished in the 1970s. The present museum was built according to the author's own description in his memoir Living to Tell the Tale, with each room named by agreement with him, and the design was approved in 2006. You walk an open passage joining white wooden rooms, each with period furniture and lines from his books on boards: the bedrooms, the office, the dining room and the kitchen. Bunches of bananas and panels on the town and the banana company hang on the walls. The house is simple, but anyone who has read the novel will recognise every corner. Aracataca is 72.1 km in a straight line south of Santa Marta and 76.7 km south-east of Barranquilla. It is hot all year, so go in the morning. The town has other places linked with the writer, including the railway station and the telegraph operator's house. Read some of the novel before you come, as the experience depends on it.
Old furniture and lines from his books.
Pots from the time of his childhood.
Panels on the town's history.
Carrera 6 Este, Aracataca, Magdalena department
No, the original was demolished in the 1970s, and the museum was built from the author's description in his memoir.
The town inspired Macondo in the novel, but Macondo itself is fictional.